The numbers that changed and the mountain that moved
Previously, on Scribblings… this week I’m writing about Air New Zealand flight TE901, an Auckland-to-Antarctica round trip sightseeing flight that never returned home, only to be found later in the form of wreckage on the slopes of an active volcano, with all hands lost.
In the absence of survivors, and with nothing immediately jumping out as a red flag on the cockpit voice recorder, investigators and the public were left scratching their heads. Theories ranged from mild to wild. Had yet another DC-10 gone to pieces? (Though later established as a safe and reliable aircraft, the still-young DC-10 didn’t have a perfect batting average at the time, with one nightmare-inducing, all-hands-lost crash on the books for 1979 already.) Had the plane gotten too close to Erebus as the volcano erupted? (Erebus is, after all, one of the most consistently active volcanoes on Earth, even if you never hear about that because of where it is.) Had freak weather conditions blinded the crew and/or their instruments? (Surely not.)
The conclusions of the two investigations into the fate of flight 901 couldn’t have been further apart if they’d tried. … Read more
